The Election Official Who Wouldn’t

ETC applauds Columbia County’s Democratic Election Commissioner, Virginia Martin, who led her county to become the only one in NY to hand-count 100% of the paper ballots produced in November’s election. In an interview with ETC published in our newsletter [free subscription at link] Martin said:

I’m responsible, along with my counterpart, for the accuracy of the vote count, and when I certify an election, I’m attesting that the results are accurate. It would be the height of irresponsibility for me to certify results if I couldn’t understand, examine, or feel confident in the vote-counting mechanism employed. And I have no reason to be confident about a software-based tabulation of secret ballots. The software might contain an inadvertent error or it might have been hacked—yet in neither case would I necessarily be aware that there was a problem.

Commissioner Martin has recently written two Op-Ed columns for The Columbia Paper regarding the hand count:

Your vote counts: Why county is hand-counting all its ballots

and

Your vote counts: This county knows who won

The work of Commissioner Martin and everyone whose efforts combined to achieve the hand count should be not only applauded, but applied in future elections in counties throughout the state and beyond.